“I Don’t Really Have Anything Good to Say”: Examining How One Teacher Worked to Shape Middle School Students’ Talk about Texts

A growing body of research suggests that adolescents’ reading identities play a significant role in how they make decisions about their involvement with classroom literacy practices. In this yearlong study in an eighth-grade English classroom, I used a formative design to consider how an instructional model intended to support students’ reading identities and development influenced their talk about classroom reading practices. I closely followed five students with varying reading identities and abilities, documenting how they talked about texts within the context of the instruction they received. I found that both the quality and quantity of students’ talk shifted over the course of the study. All students, but particularly those with reading difficulties and negative reading identities, increased how often they talked about texts. They also changed the ways they spoke about texts, shifting from asking questions primarily about assignments to asking more questions about the content they were reading about. However, as students began to change their talk, others responded by attempting to silence them or limit what they said. This study shows that while teachers can create a context that helps students reconstruct their reading identities, they will need to foster a climate where students support each other’s growth as readers and development of reading identities. Therefore, changing the habitus as it relates to reading and being a reader becomes the responsibility of everyone in the class.